'More Confessions Than Priests and Doctors'
"The life of a bookseller is a crazy one. We hear more confessions than priests and doctors. People share. A LOT. Folks come to a reading about how to turn a front lawn into a food producing garden and end up talking about their grandmas who, as it turns out, were from the same small town. By the end of the night, you have complete strangers hugging and smiling and trading recipes and crying over long dead people. That is the wonder of a reading at Charis."
--Elizabeth Anderson, program director of Charis Books and More, Atlanta, Ga., in a q&a with Poets & Writers
BINC.0408.T2.SPRINGFUNDRAISER.jpg)
In an interview, 
At Ingram, skids of World Book Night givers boxes are ready to be sent out the week of April 9. As World Book Night U.S. executive director Carl Lennertz put it: "It's happening!" World Book Night is April 23, less than a month away.
Mary Robinette Kowal, author of Glamour in Glass, which Tor is publishing April 10, is moving from Portland, Ore., to Chicago, Ill., a four-day drive. Kowal and her husband plan to stop in a major city every night, from April 24 to April 28, and are encouraging her fans who live along the route to contact their local bookseller if they want Kowal to stop by, personalize her books and maybe meet. There's a map on 
Effective May 7, Evan Schnittman joins Hachette Book Group as executive v-p, chief marketing and sales officer, a new position. He has been managing director, group sales and marketing, print and digital, at Bloomsbury Publishing and earlier worked at Oxford University Press for eight years, most recently as v-p, global corporate and business development.
Anne Tyler's 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, is a slender but touching story about an editor-publisher of thin-spined "Beginner's" guides whose grieving for his late wife is stalled--until she comes back from the dead. Tyler's introduction of a conversing and strolling ghost in the first chapter is not as jarring as you might expect. The Pulitzer-winning novelist (Breathing Lessons) does nothing to distort her clear style, nor does she whip up any mumbo-jumbo dialogue to account for the lone paranormal character. In fact, the ghost of Dr. Dorothy Rosales seems just as stolid and practical as her pre-demise self, whom the reader sees in retrospect in the ensuing chapters, as widower Aaron Woolcott looks back on the year before Dorothy's visitations began, beginning with the event that abruptly deprived him of her under-appreciated companionship.